I was having dinner with a friend tonight and we were talking about the various autism programs around the state and their philosophies.\u00a0 This friend is a colleague from the disability advocacy community, and he has had decades of experience with all of the programs and players in the adult disability community.\u00a0 He has helped me plan for Nat’s group home, and he has explained all of the issues and challenges I have to confront to make this happen.<\/p>\n
We were talking about how autism school founders are very passionate and forceful personalities — they have to be to do what they do — but that sometimes the schools end up being too dogmatic for anyone’s good.\u00a0 Nat’s school is a terrific program, but their flaws are that they are too afraid of lawsuits, so they are too risk-averse; and that they are too invested in behavior modification.<\/p>\n
But parents do it, too.\u00a0 Risk aversion may not sound like a problem, but without risk you cannot have growth.\u00a0 You have to be able to assess a person’s abilities and potential, as well as the moment and circumstances, and then try it if the difference between the former and latter are not too great.\u00a0 You have to try things in order to open up your world.\u00a0 You have to be willing to fail in order to succeed.\u00a0 It’s a cliche for a reason.<\/p>\n
Nat learned to ride a bike independently because I let him ride around the block, away from me.\u00a0 I couldn’t help it; he just took off.\u00a0 I had to pray he’d be okay.\u00a0 But I had a lot of evidence to let me feel that he would be.\u00a0 Why not?\u00a0 Just because he’s disabled doesn’t mean bad things will happen to him more than if he were not.\u00a0 And didn’t I feel just as terrified the first time Max got behind the wheel of a car?\u00a0 But I still let him practice driving.\u00a0 Risk needs to happen with our disabled kids, just as it needs to happen with our non-disabled kids.<\/p>\n
We say, “Well, it’s just different with my autistic kid.\u00a0 I can’t explain why.”\u00a0 You know what?\u00a0 We have to explain why.\u00a0 We have to get to the bottom of that.\u00a0 Because we might discover that it is irrational to feel that way.\u00a0 There may actually be no real reason that the autistic child gets the kid gloves and the normal kid gets opportunities handed to him.<\/p>\n
Too much of any one philosophy is probably too limiting.\u00a0 We are human and we get sick of things.\u00a0 Stuff loses its efficacy.\u00a0 You need to change it up sometimes.\u00a0 You need to step outside of the lines once in a while.\u00a0 And so I remember a couple of times when Nat’s school and I bumped up against each other, and I just wanted to write about it so that maybe a reader or two can learn from this.\u00a0 The first time we disagreed was when Nat was having a lot of outbursts of aggression.\u00a0 I wanted the school to deal with Nat in their way, which was why I was sending him there, but I also wanted them to have Nat apologize to the staff or student that he’d hurt.<\/p>\n
This being a behavioral school, there was no way they were going to draw attention to the undesirable behavior by having Nat apologize:\u00a0 “I’m sorry I hit you.”\u00a0 That would cause him to focus on the hit and to see that it was a big deal to that person, something that got attention and potentially become something that was therefore rewarding to him.\u00a0 But, I would argue, Nat needs to learn real-world behaviors and consequences; he needs to know how to apologize.\u00a0 He needs to understand that his actions have an effect on others.\u00a0\u00a0 Now Nat apologizes.\u00a0 Not only that, he tells me when to apologize, by saying, “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” if I yell at him.\u00a0 That is a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was having dinner with a friend tonight and we were talking about the various autism programs around the state and their philosophies.\u00a0 This friend is a colleague from the disability advocacy community, and he has had decades of experience with all of the programs and players in the adult disability community.\u00a0 He has helped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-wr","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2017,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions\/2017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}